Judgment Versus Mercy
The author of Rewriting Your Emotional Script, Becky Harling, said in her novel, "When you see a person holding a sign that reads, "Hungry," or someone waiting in line for a welfare check, do you jump to conclusions about his or her integrity or work ethic? When you see someone who is inebriated and lying in the streets do you feel that he deserves to be homeless because he struggles with an addiction?"(125). Why are we so quick to turn to judgment rather than mercy?
An issue is that people do not understand the types of poverty. In order to even begin to understand the poor, you must first know where they are coming from. The two different types of poverty: generational and situational. Generational poverty is poverty that has lasted longer than two generations and is often passed through families. Situational poverty is when an event happens, which causes poverty such as loss of job, death in the family, or poor decision that could be drug related. Poverty is a cycle entrapping people; it needs to be broken.
Not only do we need to fully understand the concept of poverty, but we also need to know how our culture is currently failing to deal with it. Our culture is failing, because we often times push ourselves above people by capitalizing every opportunity made available. We are also so quick to generalize the poor as welfare abuser, ignorant, thieves and drug addicts. People are currently abusing the system and do steal, but to say that every person that is inflicted by poverty is this way is an absurd excuse not to offer mercy.
Our culture lacks empathy. Someone once told me that the poor needed to help themselves, and there is nothing the average American can do for them. It's pretty pathetic that our country no longer helps one another out, because there was a time when people were dependent upon one another. When you could ask your neighbor for sugar or an egg. Unfortunately, we live in an independent society, where we do not need each other, nor do we desire to. We do everything on our own and would never admit we need help from another. Therefore, when someone is in need of help, they are inferior.
How do we begin to extend mercy? The least we could do for the poverty-stricken is meeting the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter. The problem is that we all assume it's taken care of by someone else; someone that makes sure our daily lives are not interrupted by beggars. If only we could become united and instead of pushing people down, we put them before ourselves. We can sacrifice our time and take action to promote change instead of being self-centered. To go even further than meeting the basic needs would mean becoming involved in a nonprofit organization and begin educating the poor on how to get out of the situational and generational cycles. Instead of judging the drunken man on the street and giving him condescending glares, we walked with him and help him out of his addition.
By beginning to meet the necessary needs, mercy can begin to be extended instead of judgment. You can be the catalyst that offers change to a community without hope.
